The Mirror and the Mind

By following the mirror through a range of historical contexts, The Mirror and the Mind offers a new way of understanding the history of psychology. While the standard history of psychology is told as a succession of movements, tracing its beginnings in the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) through the behaviorist critiques of introspection, to the rise of cognitivism and neuroscience,the mirror test carves a different path through the mind sciences. It did not constitute a tradition as normally understood. Although some mirror experimenters drew on a network of intellectual references, many were not aware of these connections. What holds the actors in the book together is rather a shared set of material practices centered on the mirror as a piece of experimental equipment. As such it guides us along the backroads of psychology, giving new paths linking the major movements, offering us new perspectives on canonical authors, and introducing us along the way to figures who rarely appear in standard narratives, such as developmental psychologist Wilhelm Preyer (1841-1897), or female scientists such as Milicent Shinn (1858-1940) and Charlotte Bühler (1893-1974). It also shows how psychology was connected with neighboring fields in the human sciences: beyond developmental psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, the history of the mirror test takes us on a tour through robotics, neuroscience, anthropology, and media theory.